OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Analysing and Organising Human Communications for AI Fairness-Related Decisions: Use Cases from the Public Sector
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

AI algorithms used in the public sector, e.g., for allocating social benefits or predicting fraud, often involve multiple public and private stakeholders at various phases of the algorithm's life-cycle. Communication issues between these diverse stakeholders can lead to misinterpretation and misuse of algorithms. We investigate the communication processes for AI fairness-related decisions by conducting interviews with practitioners working on algorithmic systems in the public sector. By applying qualitative coding analysis, we identify key elements of communication processes that underlie fairness-related human decisions. We analyze the division of roles, tasks, skills, and challenges perceived by stakeholders. We formalize the underlying communication issues within a conceptual framework that i. represents the communication patterns ii. outlines missing elements, such as actors who miss skills for their tasks. The framework is used for describing and analyzing key organizational issues for fairness-related decisions. Three general patterns emerge from the analysis: 1. Policy-makers, civil servants, and domain experts are less involved compared to developers throughout a system's life-cycle. This leads to developers taking on extra roles such as advisor, while they potentially miss the required skills and guidance from domain experts. 2. End-users and policy-makers often lack the technical skills to interpret a system's limitations, and rely on developer roles for making decisions concerning fairness issues. 3. Citizens are structurally absent throughout a system's life-cycle, which may lead to decisions that do not include relevant considerations from impacted stakeholders.
LLMs as Writing Assistants: Exploring Perspectives on Sense of Ownership and Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Sense of ownership in writing confines our investment of thoughts, time, and contribution, leading to attachment to the output. However, using writing assistants introduces a mental dilemma, as some content isn't directly our creation. For instance, we tend to credit Large Language Models (LLMs) more in creative tasks, even though all tasks are equal for them. Additionally, while we may not claim complete ownership of LLM-generated content, we freely claim authorship. We conduct a short survey to examine these issues and understand underlying cognitive processes in order to gain a better knowledge of human-computer interaction in writing and improve writing aid systems.
Policy Optimization finds Nash Equilibrium in Regularized General-Sum LQ Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we investigate the impact of introducing relative entropy regularization on the Nash Equilibria (NE) of General-Sum $N$-agent games, revealing the fact that the NE of such games conform to linear Gaussian policies. Moreover, it delineates sufficient conditions, contingent upon the adequacy of entropy regularization, for the uniqueness of the NE within the game. As Policy Optimization serves as a foundational approach for Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques aimed at finding the NE, in this work we prove the linear convergence of a policy optimization algorithm which (subject to the adequacy of entropy regularization) is capable of provably attaining the NE. Furthermore, in scenarios where the entropy regularization proves insufficient, we present a $δ$-augmentation technique, which facilitates the achievement of an $ε$-NE within the game.
Towards a Theoretical Foundation of Process Science
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Process science is a highly interdisciplinary field of research. Despite numerous proposals, process science lacks an adequate understanding of the core concepts of the field, including notions such as process, event, and system. A more systematic framework to cope with process science is mandatory. We suggest such a framework using an example. The framework itself addresses three aspects: architecture, statics, and dynamics. Corresponding formal concepts, based on established scientific theories, together provide an integrated framework for understanding processes in the world. We argue that our foundations have positive implications not only for theoretical research, but also for empirical research, e.g., because hypothesized relationships can be explicitly tested. It is now time to start a discussion about the foundations of our field.
A Backdoor Approach with Inverted Labels Using Dirty Label-Flipping Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Audio-based machine learning systems frequently use public or third-party data, which might be inaccurate. This exposes deep neural network (DNN) models trained on such data to potential data poisoning attacks. In this type of assault, attackers can train the DNN model using poisoned data, potentially degrading its performance. Another type of data poisoning attack that is extremely relevant to our investigation is label flipping, in which the attacker manipulates the labels for a subset of data. It has been demonstrated that these assaults may drastically reduce system performance, even for attackers with minimal abilities. In this study, we propose a backdoor attack named 'DirtyFlipping', which uses dirty label techniques, "label-on-label", to input triggers (clapping) in the selected data patterns associated with the target class, thereby enabling a stealthy backdoor.
Security Risks Concerns of Generative AI in the IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In an era where the Internet of Things (IoT) intersects increasingly with generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), this article scrutinizes the emergent security risks inherent in this integration. We explore how generative AI drives innovation in IoT and we analyze the potential for data breaches when using generative AI and the misuse of generative AI technologies in IoT ecosystems. These risks not only threaten the privacy and efficiency of IoT systems but also pose broader implications for trust and safety in AI-driven environments. The discussion in this article extends to strategic approaches for mitigating these risks, including the development of robust security protocols, the multi-layered security approaches, and the adoption of AI technological solutions. Through a comprehensive analysis, this article aims to shed light on the critical balance between embracing AI advancements and ensuring stringent security in IoT, providing insights into the future direction of these intertwined technologies.
Accelerating Search-Based Planning for Multi-Robot Manipulation by Leveraging Online-Generated Experiences
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

An exciting frontier in robotic manipulation is the use of multiple arms at once. However, planning concurrent motions is a challenging task using current methods. The high-dimensional composite state space renders many well-known motion planning algorithms intractable. Recently, Multi-Agent Path-Finding (MAPF) algorithms have shown promise in discrete 2D domains, providing rigorous guarantees. However, widely used conflict-based methods in MAPF assume an efficient single-agent motion planner. This poses challenges in adapting them to manipulation cases where this assumption does not hold, due to the high dimensionality of configuration spaces and the computational bottlenecks associated with collision checking. To this end, we propose an approach for accelerating conflict-based search algorithms by leveraging their repetitive and incremental nature -- making them tractable for use in complex scenarios involving multi-arm coordination in obstacle-laden environments. We show that our method preserves completeness and bounded sub-optimality guarantees, and demonstrate its practical efficacy through a set of experiments with up to 10 robotic arms.
No Risk, No Reward: Towards An Automated Measure of Psychological Safety from Online Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The data created from virtual communication platforms presents the opportunity to explore automated measures for monitoring team performance. In this work, we explore one important characteristic of successful teams - Psychological Safety - or the belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. To move towards an automated measure of this phenomenon, we derive virtual communication characteristics and message keywords related to elements of Psychological Safety from the literature. Using a mixed methods approach, we investigate whether these characteristics are present in the Slack messages from two design teams - one high in Psychological Safety, and one low. We find that some usage characteristics, such as replies, reactions, and user mentions, might be promising metrics to indicate higher levels of Psychological Safety, while simple keyword searches may not be nuanced enough. We present the first step towards the automated detection of this important, yet complex, team characteristic.
On Inherent Adversarial Robustness of Active Vision Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Current Deep Neural Networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which alter their predictions by adding carefully crafted noise. Since human eyes are robust to such inputs, it is possible that the vulnerability stems from the standard way of processing inputs in one shot by processing every pixel with the same importance. In contrast, neuroscience suggests that the human vision system can differentiate salient features by (1) switching between multiple fixation points (saccades) and (2) processing the surrounding with a non-uniform external resolution (foveation). In this work, we advocate that the integration of such active vision mechanisms into current deep learning systems can offer robustness benefits. Specifically, we empirically demonstrate the inherent robustness of two active vision methods - GFNet and FALcon - under a black box threat model. By learning and inferencing based on downsampled glimpses obtained from multiple distinct fixation points within an input, we show that these active methods achieve (2-3) times greater robustness compared to a standard passive convolutional network under state-of-the-art adversarial attacks. More importantly, we provide illustrative and interpretable visualization analysis that demonstrates how performing inference from distinct fixation points makes active vision methods less vulnerable to malicious inputs.
Optimal Blackjack Strategy Recommender: A Comprehensive Study on Computer Vision Integration for Enhanced Gameplay
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This research project investigates the application of several computer vision techniques for playing card detection and recognition in the context of the popular casino game, blackjack. The primary objective is to develop a robust system that is capable of detecting and accurately classifying playing cards in real-time, and displaying the optimal move recommendation based on the given image of the current game. The proposed methodology involves using K-Means for image segmentation, card reprojection and feature extraction, training of the KNN classifier using a labeled dataset, and integration of the detection system into a Blackjack Basic Strategy recommendation algorithm. Further, the study aims to observe the effectiveness of this approach in detecting various card designs under different lighting conditions and occlusions. Overall, the project examines the potential benefits of incorporating computer vision techniques, with a specific focus on card detection, into commonly played games aiming to enhance player decision-making and optimize strategic outcomes. The results obtained from our experimental evaluations with models developed under considerable time constraints, highlight the potential for practical implementation in real-world casino environments and across other similarly structured games.
Classification and Clustering of Sentence-Level Embeddings of Scientific Articles Generated by Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Scientific articles are long text documents organized into sections, each describing aspects of the research. Analyzing scientific production has become progressively challenging due to the increase in the number of available articles. Within this scenario, our approach consisted of fine-tuning transformer language models to generate sentence-level embeddings from scientific articles, considering the following labels: background, objective, methods, results, and conclusion. We trained our models on three datasets with contrastive learning. Two datasets are from the article's abstracts in the computer science and medical domains. Also, we introduce PMC-Sents-FULL, a novel dataset of sentences extracted from the full texts of medical articles. We compare the fine-tuned and baseline models in clustering and classification tasks to evaluate our approach. On average, clustering agreement measures values were five times higher. For the classification measures, in the best-case scenario, we had an average improvement in F1-micro of 30.73\%. Results show that fine-tuning sentence transformers with contrastive learning and using the generated embeddings in downstream tasks is a feasible approach to sentence classification in scientific articles. Our experiment codes are available on GitHub.
Design as Desired: Utilizing Visual Question Answering for Multimodal Pre-training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal pre-training demonstrates its potential in the medical domain, which learns medical visual representations from paired medical reports. However, many pre-training tasks require extra annotations from clinicians, and most of them fail to explicitly guide the model to learn the desired features of different pathologies. In this paper, we utilize Visual Question Answering (VQA) for multimodal pre-training to guide the framework focusing on targeted pathological features. We leverage descriptions in medical reports to design multi-granular question-answer pairs associated with different diseases, which assist the framework in pre-training without requiring extra annotations from experts. We also propose a novel pre-training framework with a quasi-textual feature transformer, a module designed to transform visual features into a quasi-textual space closer to the textual domain via a contrastive learning strategy. This narrows the vision-language gap and facilitates modality alignment. Our framework is applied to four downstream tasks: report generation, classification, segmentation, and detection across five datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/MoramiSu/QFT-MICCAI2024.
Approximation of a Pareto Set Segment Using a Linear Model with Sharing Variables
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

In many real-world applications, the Pareto Set (PS) of a continuous multiobjective optimization problem can be a piecewise continuous manifold. A decision maker may want to find a solution set that approximates a small part of the PS and requires the solutions in this set share some similarities. This paper makes a first attempt to address this issue. We first develop a performance metric that considers both optimality and variable sharing. Then we design an algorithm for finding the model that minimizes the metric to meet the user's requirements. Experimental results illustrate that we can obtain a linear model that approximates the mapping from the preference vectors to solutions in a local area well.
Exploiting Self-Supervised Constraints in Image Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in self-supervised learning, predominantly studied in high-level visual tasks, have been explored in low-level image processing. This paper introduces a novel self-supervised constraint for single image super-resolution, termed SSC-SR. SSC-SR uniquely addresses the divergence in image complexity by employing a dual asymmetric paradigm and a target model updated via exponential moving average to enhance stability. The proposed SSC-SR framework works as a plug-and-play paradigm and can be easily applied to existing SR models. Empirical evaluations reveal that our SSC-SR framework delivers substantial enhancements on a variety of benchmark datasets, achieving an average increase of 0.1 dB over EDSR and 0.06 dB over SwinIR. In addition, extensive ablation studies corroborate the effectiveness of each constituent in our SSC-SR framework. Codes are available at https://github.com/Aitical/SSCSR.
A hybrid transformer and attention based recurrent neural network for robust and interpretable sentiment analysis of tweets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Sentiment analysis is crucial for understanding public opinion and consumer behavior. Existing models face challenges with linguistic diversity, generalizability, and explainability. We propose TRABSA, a hybrid framework integrating transformer-based architectures, attention mechanisms, and BiLSTM networks to address this. Leveraging RoBERTa-trained on 124M tweets, we bridge gaps in sentiment analysis benchmarks, ensuring state-of-the-art accuracy. Augmenting datasets with tweets from 32 countries and US states, we compare six word-embedding techniques and three lexicon-based labeling techniques, selecting the best for optimal sentiment analysis. TRABSA outperforms traditional ML and deep learning models with 94% accuracy and significant precision, recall, and F1-score gains. Evaluation across diverse datasets demonstrates consistent superiority and generalizability. SHAP and LIME analyses enhance interpretability, improving confidence in predictions. Our study facilitates pandemic resource management, aiding resource planning, policy formation, and vaccination tactics.
Enhancing Empathy in Virtual Reality: An Embodied Approach to Mindset Modulation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

A growth mindset has shown promising outcomes for increasing empathy ability. However, stimulating a growth mindset in VR-based empathy interventions is under-explored. In the present study, we implemented prosocial VR content, Our Neighbor Hero, focusing on embodying a virtual character to modulate players' mindsets. The virtual body served as a stepping stone, enabling players to identify with the character and cultivate a growth mindset as they followed mission instructions. We considered several implementation factors to assist players in positioning within the VR experience, including positive feedback, content difficulty, background lighting, and multimodal feedback. We conducted an experiment to investigate the intervention's effectiveness in increasing empathy. Our findings revealed that the VR content and mindset training encouraged participants to improve their growth mindsets and empathic motives. This VR content was developed for college students to enhance their empathy and teamwork skills. It has the potential to improve collaboration in organizational and community environments.
Instrument-tissue Interaction Detection Framework for Surgical Video Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Instrument-tissue interaction detection task, which helps understand surgical activities, is vital for constructing computer-assisted surgery systems but with many challenges. Firstly, most models represent instrument-tissue interaction in a coarse-grained way which only focuses on classification and lacks the ability to automatically detect instruments and tissues. Secondly, existing works do not fully consider relations between intra- and inter-frame of instruments and tissues. In the paper, we propose to represent instrument-tissue interaction as <instrument class, instrument bounding box, tissue class, tissue bounding box, action class> quintuple and present an Instrument-Tissue Interaction Detection Network (ITIDNet) to detect the quintuple for surgery videos understanding. Specifically, we propose a Snippet Consecutive Feature (SCF) Layer to enhance features by modeling relationships of proposals in the current frame using global context information in the video snippet. We also propose a Spatial Corresponding Attention (SCA) Layer to incorporate features of proposals between adjacent frames through spatial encoding. To reason relationships between instruments and tissues, a Temporal Graph (TG) Layer is proposed with intra-frame connections to exploit relationships between instruments and tissues in the same frame and inter-frame connections to model the temporal information for the same instance. For evaluation, we build a cataract surgery video (PhacoQ) dataset and a cholecystectomy surgery video (CholecQ) dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of our model, which outperforms other state-of-the-art models on both datasets.
On Task and in Sync: Examining the Relationship between Gaze Synchrony and Self-Reported Attention During Video Lecture Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Successful learning depends on learners' ability to sustain attention, which is particularly challenging in online education due to limited teacher interaction. A potential indicator for attention is gaze synchrony, demonstrating predictive power for learning achievements in video-based learning in controlled experiments focusing on manipulating attention. This study (N=84) examines the relationship between gaze synchronization and self-reported attention of learners, using experience sampling, during realistic online video learning. Gaze synchrony was assessed through Kullback-Leibler Divergence of gaze density maps and MultiMatch algorithm scanpath comparisons. Results indicated significantly higher gaze synchronization in attentive participants for both measures and self-reported attention significantly predicted post-test scores. In contrast, synchrony measures did not correlate with learning outcomes. While supporting the hypothesis that attentive learners exhibit similar eye movements, the direct use of synchrony as an attention indicator poses challenges, requiring further research on the interplay of attention, gaze synchrony, and video content type.
Accurate Cutting-point Estimation for Robotic Lychee Harvesting through Geometry-aware Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Accurately identifying lychee-picking points in unstructured orchard environments and obtaining their coordinate locations is critical to the success of lychee-picking robots. However, traditional two-dimensional (2D) image-based object detection methods often struggle due to the complex geometric structures of branches, leaves and fruits, leading to incorrect determination of lychee picking points. In this study, we propose a Fcaf3d-lychee network model specifically designed for the accurate localisation of lychee picking points. Point cloud data of lychee picking points in natural environments are acquired using Microsoft's Azure Kinect DK time-of-flight (TOF) camera through multi-view stitching. We augment the Fully Convolutional Anchor-Free 3D Object Detection (Fcaf3d) model with a squeeze-and-excitation(SE) module, which exploits human visual attention mechanisms for improved feature extraction of lychee picking points. The trained network model is evaluated on a test set of lychee-picking locations and achieves an impressive F1 score of 88.57%, significantly outperforming existing models. Subsequent three-dimensional (3D) position detection of picking points in real lychee orchard environments yields high accuracy, even under varying degrees of occlusion. Localisation errors of lychee picking points are within 1.5 cm in all directions, demonstrating the robustness and generality of the model.